Maybe this only matters to me, but my biggest gripe with IRC as a protocol is the lack of embedded newline ability. Take away newlines and now you've prevented

Maybe this only matters to me, but my biggest gripe with IRC as a protocol is the lack of embedded newline ability. Take away newlines and now you've prevented atomic code snippets and killed newline sensitive markup suck as Markdown. I deeply appreciate the history and communities available on IRC, but as a protocol, good riddance to it.